24 comments:

It is weird how much cartoon images can affect the mind more than seeing pictures of people in real settings who seem so temporary and weak next to a cartoon image of a person. Cartoon images speak in an exagerated languge of their own.

When I followed the link, I was worried that there were more than four. I have a compulsion with comics, such that I have to read them all. If I'm out of town, I'll follow serials where I have no idea what's going on. I even read comics I can't stand. Fortunately, I don't go looking for them; they have to be in the paper.

I even read comics I can't stand. I used to do that, religiously. Then I tried eliminating just one: Garfield. It's just not funny. I had to train my eyes to skip a row, but after a short while, I felt good about it. Then I went for Cathy. Cathy won't shut the hell up, and she's still not funny. After I mastered that one, it became easier to just read what I found entertaining. (The art of losing isn't hard to master.)

Of course now the comic page is so crammed and small, I can't read it anyway, not even with my sparkly new bifocals.

I like this thought about her:"Cathy was and is the early warning sign of a culture about to fall, of a grand civilization tottering toward its grave. When historians look back at the United States, Cathy Guisewite will be held up as one of the first signals that something was wrong. They will shake their heads at our folly and ask, “Why was nothing done?""

My all time favorite Dilbert comic dates from somewhere in 1993-95. They installed motion sensor light switches in the office but cubicle workers didn't move enought to keep to lights on, so they hired an intern to run around flapping his arms. Dilbert looks at him and says, "Ah, another journalism major has entered the workforce."

We have those motion sensor switches at my work, but no interns.

If there was a golden age of comics, it was when Bloom County, Dilbert, Calvin and Hobbs, and The Far Side were all running at the same time.

Pogo, yes, that was the one. On top of her being the speaker, it was a cold, rainy day in Ann Arbor and the ceremony was at the football stadium. I couldn't see beyond the umbrellas of the people in front of me, the wind was whipping through the stadium, and I was listening to Cathy Guisewite say how she knew she would be a good writer when she wrote an A- paper on Ulysses without having read it.